Atribute to Lewis Collins, the Mojo musician who became famous in the late 1970s as hit man Bodie in The Professionals, reveals that his greatest disappointment was not his decision to be a hairdresser rather than join the Beatles as a drummer but his failure to get the James Bond role after Roger Moore. Too aggressive, it was said, but really – since they chose cleft-chinned toff Timothy Dalton instead – they probably meant he wasn't smooth enough. Yet, as Ian Fleming said when he wrote to the Guardian in 1958 to defend his creation against encouraging a cult of luxury (eg choosing a brand of cigarette for its exclusivity rather than its taste), his James Bond was meant to be a blank sheet, an unobtrusive figure to whom exotic things happened. The personal style – the martini cocktail and the Walther PPK – were added as mere dabs of colour, at least as understood by an old Etonian living in Jamaica. It was Hollywood, not Fleming, that fleshed out the empire's last superhero, building up his suave style and the one-liners and making him a maverick rather than Fleming's classic Englishman. But Fleming enjoyed suggesting that Bond's sadistic violence was actually a rejection of the post-war world of teeth and specs on the state, while what one critic called his satyriasis was, according to Fleming, merely blatant heterosexuality in a world of gender confusion. It's harder to know the face of the enemy now, and Daniel Craig's Bond has become less upper-crust and more complex. But not yet a man of the people.